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Our DSL connection is really bad today. We're spending more time offline than we are online. Yesterday, I had to make a phone call via our landline, and I almost couldn't understand what was being said on the other end.

Cordelia ended up staying up quite late last night. It was 10:30 by the time she went to bed. She took a very long time showering and brushing her teeth. I'm not sure how she managed to stretch things out to more than an hour. Scott wanted to go to bed, so he wasn't best pleased.

I went ahead and signed up for Not Primetime. I offered nine fandoms. There were another four I thought about but decided I couldn't really pull off. I requested five fandoms. I have no idea which of them have offers. I'll probably look at the sign up summary later (assuming our internet comes back). I'd rather not have to change my requests or offers, but last year my requests went to the pinch hitters and nobody knew my fandoms. I had to come up with a set of requests in more widely known fandoms.

Scott's running two Science Olympiad practices today, one for the second graders at 11:00 and one for the fourth graders at 5:00. The second graders are coming off a Girl Scout camping trip, so Scott's expecting them to be distracted and tired, but they can't afford to skip a week. The Science Olympiad is the 10th, so there are only two practices left, and the second graders have missed a lot of sessions due to scheduling difficulties.

Cordelia thinks she can go down the street and knock on her friends' door now. They planned for her to do it at 1:00 today, so I hope she can. The friend who was too scared to come into our house (after getting stuck briefly in the basement bathroom) has now decided that she can come into the house as long as she doesn't go into the basement. Her anxiety levels are way past Cordelia's. There was one day when she was over and panicked about the possibility of a tornado in spite of the weather being completely clear without even a tornado watch on. Her father had apparently made a joke that she interpreted as meaning that there would be a tornado. Nothing anybody said calmed or reassured her.

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We went to the library as soon as Scott's session with the second graders ended. Scott dropped me and Cordelia off at the library then went for bubble tea. Cordelia and I took care of checking out my holds relatively rapidly. Then Cordelia checked to see if there was a copy of The House of Hades on the shelf. She owns the book but has loaned it to a friend and now wants to reread it.

I got a couple of books on making rubber band jewelry with one of those peg looms (Cordelia has a Rainbow loom. There are several other kinds). One of the books proved to have nothing that Cordelia hadn't seen before, so we returned it. The other book has a lot of stuff that's new to her, but some of it calls for having multiple looms hooked together. Rainbow looms aren't set up to do that (and they're $18 each), so I don't think she'll be able to try those items.

Last night, for the first time ever, Cordelia said she might be interested in fanfic. She asked if there were stories based on Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series and Heroes of Olympus series. I told her there were. She then seemed to think about it and said that she doesn't want to look at fic until after The Blood of Olympus comes out in October. I wonder if she'll still be interested then. I mean, she really loves those books, the Heroes of Olympus more than the Percy Jackson stuff. I could see her turning to fic because she doesn't want the series to be over.

The other day, I talked with another mother about fanfic. She had asked what I write, and I told her in very general terms. Mostly, people aren't particularly interested beyond wanting a brief explanation of what fanfic is. This mother, however, thought her daughter (who is nine or ten) might be interested in Doctor Who fanfic. I warned her about the likelihood of encountering explicit and/or violent material. She seemed to feel that sexually explicit material was simply one of the risks of the internet, something that could be worked around. I sent her an e-mail with three links (AO3, fanfiction.net and A Teaspoon and an Open Mind) to places where she could find Doctor Who fic. I warned her that a lot of fic is simply bad and mentioned the existence of slash. At the ratings I suggested, she's unlikely to run into anything more than a kiss and a fade to black. (If that. Do people still rate higher for same sex kissing than for opposite sex kissing? They used to when I first started reading fic about fifteen years ago.)

I fiddled around with my iPod for the first time in months last night. It needed charging, and the software needed updating. Unfortunately, every time I plug it in to my laptop to charge, it loses my place in the book I'm working on. That seems to me to be a major software problem. Cordelia's been urging me to start walking on the treadmill again so that I can make some progress in my current book. She's appalled that I've only just started The Son of Neptune (book two of the Heroes of Olympus. Book five comes out in October) and haven't made any progress on it in months. She doesn't see how someone could bear to simply stop in the middle like that.

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Our DSL is going through for just seconds at a time. Sometimes it stays connected long enough to retrieve my e-mail. Sometimes it doesn't. I'm glad I signed up for Not Primetime last night. I wouldn't have been able to do it today, and there's no way to know when we'll have reliable service again. It's definitely the phone line and not Earthlink that's the problem. I may have to go into town to the library tomorrow just to get my e-mail.